iPhone fans, start drooling. Skeptics, have your grains of salt at the ready. An iPhone 5 — or at least something closely fitting the rumored description of the iPhone 5 — has just been spotted… on a train, of all places.

 

The shot up above (and the ever-so-slightly-different one below) comes from 9to5Mac, who received them from a tipster who claims to have spotted the device on his way home from work.

Alas, these two just-too-far-away glimpses are as good as it gets for now. While most news reporter-types out there would run through a pack of angry charging bulls and scale a building covered in butter for a shot of the iPhone 5, the tipster seems to have practiced at least a bit of caution in their undercover photography session. The person holding the device was supposedly being quite cautious to keep it at least partially covered, masking the Apple logo behind their fingers throughout.

Fortunately, their eyes worked a bit better than their camera. Here’s what they had to share about the purported prototype:

• This was not an iPhone 4 or 3GS, they say. The tipster previously owned both, and was positive it was nothing they’d ever seen before.
• It supposedly has an “almost EVO-like screen”, which fits with the long-living rumor that the next iPhone has an edge-to-edge display. Now, the EVO has a 4.3″ display — and unless Apple is planning on making the next iPhone considerably bigger, I’m doubting the iPhone 5′s display will get nearly that huge. My sources long ago told me to expect something in the 3.7″ – 3.75″ range. With next to no bezel, though, a 3.7″ display could look much bigger from a distance than it actually is.
• Rounded metal (as opposed to square) edges, with what appeared to be a tapered, black glass back — just as the rumor mill has been saying for months

Could this be the real deal? It’s plausible. The iPhone 5 is said to be coming in just over a month (sometime in September), which means there absolutely are iPhone 5s out there, right this second, being field tested. Apple can install as many cell towers on their campus as they want, but it’s nearly impossible to release a phone without testing its signal attenuation and performance in the real world. After Antennagate, you can bet that Apple is going to make damned sure that the iPhone 5 has rock solid signal performance.

With that said, think back to the lost iPhone 4 prototype. At first glance, it looked just like an iPhone 3GS — because Apple had disguised it as one. A special case was made just to mask the new hardware as something not worth a second glance. Would Apple really let an iPhone 5 prototype lurk about in public in the nude? Maybe in the back of a blacked out van — but on what looks to be something like CalTrain? Doubtful.

Also doubtful: where the heck is the camera flash? While my geek side would love for this to be an iPhone 5, my skeptic side is saying it’s a 3GS shot from a strange angle.

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In the past few years, Apple has been in berzerker mode. Not even 15 years ago, they were on the verge of collapse when Michael Dell famously said that if he were CEO of Apple he would, “shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders”. Apple now has a market cap well over ten times that of Dell’s. And in the past year or so, Apple has even managed to far surpass their old nemesis, Microsoft, in terms of market cap, revenue, and profit.

Today, Apple’s stock closed above $400 a share for the first time. This has pushed their market cap up to roughly $375 billion, making my prediction that they have a shot at catching Exxon to become the most valuable public company in the world this fall, look pretty good (they’re now “just” $45 billion away).

But what’s next? What other mountain can Apple scale? Well, there’s still a pretty big one in the tech sphere.

It’s easy to forget that despite all of the financial success Apple has had in recent years, they’ve still been far behind a couple rivals in one key metric: revenue. In the previous full financial years, both IBM and HP have towered over Apple in this category. IBM’s last fiscal year saw them report $99.87 billion in revenue. Meanwhile, HP reported an astounding $126 billion. Apple? They reported roughly $65 billion. Yes, HP was still nearly double Apple in revenue.

But that was last fiscal year — which ended almost a year ago for all the companies. Things are changing quickly when you look at the more recent numbers. And they very much point to Apple taking this crown as well.

In the last four quarters, Apple has reported $100.32 billion in revenue. In the same timeframe, IBM reported $104.6 billion. Given these numbers, it wouldn’t be surprising at all if Apple surpasses IBM in yearly revenue next quarter.

But what about HP?  In the past four quarters, they’ve reported $127.9 billion in revenue. So they’re still quite a bit ahead of Apple. But not far enough ahead that Apple can’t catch them in the next year or so.

HP’s reporting timetable is a bit odd. While many tech companies reported earnings in the past few weeks or will do so this week, HP doesn’t report their Q3 2011 numbers until August 18. So the most recent numbers we have for them are Q2, which ended in May. In that quarter, HP reported $31.6 billion in revenue. In Apple’s last quarter just ended, they reported $28.57 billion. So Apple is clearly closing the gap — and fast — but there’s still some ground to make up on a quarter-to-quarter basis. That could change next quarter, or it could take until Apple’s next holiday quarter (in two quarters). But it seems almost a foregone conclusion at this point that Apple will surpass HP in revenue on a quarterly basis soon.

Is it fair to compare HP and Apple in this regard? Yes. While some complain that comparing Microsoft to Apple is comparing a software company to a hardware company (even though both do both), HP and Apple are much more akin.

HP is the largest PC-maker in the world. With the recent launches of devices like the TouchPad and the Pre, they’re clearly going right after Apple. They also now make their own software, webOS, thanks to the Palm acquisition. And while HP won’t admit it, insiders suggest that their strategy the past year or so has been to  become more like Apple.

When I wrote that a year ago, some were up in arms, citing the fact that HP brings in so much more revenue than Apple does. But again, that was then. Things looks very different now. And the trends should be clear to all.

Further, while HP still holds the revenue crown, Apple has far surpassed HP in the one metric more important: profit. You know, the money you actually get to keep.

In the last four quarters, HP did $11.4 billion in profit. Apple? $23.61 billion. Yes, Apple pulls in more than double the profit despite trailing in revenue.

As we enter the “post-PC” world, where iPhone and iPad sales far outpace Mac sales for Apple  (a chart by asymco today illustrates this nicely), HP will have their work cut out for them in order to maintain their revenue crown. Unless the Pre or the TouchPad take off, I’m not sure that HP will be able to hold off Apple for long. I give them a year.

Taiwanese phone maker HTC has said that it’s willing to talk things out with Apple over the two companies’ recent patent spat, Reuters reports.

“We are open to all sorts of solutions, as long as the solution and the terms are fair and reasonable,” HTC CFO Winston Yung told Reuters in an interview. “On and off we’ve had discussions with Apple, even before the initial determination came out.”

The news comes after Apple scored a significant patent victory over HTC from the U.S. International Trade Commission two weeks ago. The victory could ultimately force HTC to stop selling Android phones in the US, and could potentially be applied to Android phones from other manufacturers (in a worst case scenario). HTC has said it will appeal the decision, but we won’t know the full outcome until the end of the year.

Earlier this month, HTC acquired S3 Graphics for $300 million, giving it access to S3′s technology and significant patent portfolio. S3 also scored an ITC patent win of its own over Apple just a week before HTC announced its intentions to purchase the graphics company. But just like Apple’s win over HTC, the S3 ruling is subject to review.

HTC is already paying licensing fees to Microsoft for every Android phone it sells, a strategy that seems to be paying off quite well for Microsoft. Paying out additional fees to Apple could end up being a major hit to HTC’s revenues, but it’s certainly better than some alternative outcomes.

Google, not surprisingly, has little patience for these escalating smartphone patent wars. “The tech industry has a significant problem,” Google general counsel Kent Walker told Reuters. “Software patents are kind of gumming up the works of innovation.”

“Each side can blow the other up on some level — everybody can block the other’s products from coming to market,” he said. “You create this mutually assured destruction scenario, but it’s very expensive to get all those munitions.”

Walker went on to say that “it’s not good form” to acquire patents just to disarm competitors. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt also expressed frustration last week over Apple’s pursuit of lawsuits instead of innovation.

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Like many of you, I am visiting family this holiday season and nowhere does gadget snobbery become more apparent than during gatherings with loved ones. Aside from the ubiquitous “Whose phone is faster?” question, which in my case led to an email race at Christmas dinner, there is endless potential for the marginally tech savvy to show off during the holidays.

But all the superiority gleaned from being able to load non-iTunes purchases into your mom’s iPod is tossed out the window when faced with a relative’s overly complex coffee machine, an arbitrarily complicated alarm clock and two separate indecipherable TV remotes for one TV.

In my first encounter with my family’s new Cuisinart Coffee Maker CHW-12 Cup Programmable with Hot Water System, I ended up confused by the superfluous “Hot Water System” and poured the water intended for coffee in there instead of the coffee maker, costing myself an extra 20 minutes trying to figure out how to extract coffee from the infernal thing. I almost went to Starbucks.

Many people received iPads and iPhones this Christmas, and because of Apple’s legendary intuitive and straightforward design, could pull them right out of the box and commence using. Not the case with a battery powered pepper grinder one of my relatives received at our gift exchange. It took three people to put together and when we did get it to work, we hilariously realized that it had a flashlight at the bottom, for no reason. Novel? yes. Productive? No.

In my own home, I use a De’Longhi Magnifica espresso machine, which is the closest thing to what would happen if Apple made a coffee machine. With literally a push of a button, it grinds coffee beans, brews them and even cleans itself afterwards.

I am not alone in the quest for simpler appliance design, Coding Horror’s Jeff Atwood is similarly befuddled by the controls interface of a microwave:

“I was struck, the other day, by how much I had to think when attempting to heat up my sandwich in the microwave. There are so many controls: a clock, a set of food-specific buttons, defrost and timer controls, and of course a full numeric keypad. Quick! What do you press?”

The saddest thing is that appliances used to be simpler. Old style microwaves used to have one knob, that only represented time. Now we’ve got a controls for various foods and buttons for “More,”"Less,”"Dinner Plate,”"Defrost,” the cryptic “Auto-Defrost” and so on when all we end up doing is putting our Hot Pockets in there and trial and erroring our way to the perfect cooking time. “Hmm, this looks like it is about done.”

Dieter Ram’s appliance designs for Braun, which inspired the design team at Apple, hearken to a pre-digital touchpad era when design aspired to help us understand products or at least be unobtrusive. I guess I have the seventies to thank for the fact that I’ve got a radio alarm clock next to me right now that I have never used because I seriously can’t figure out how to the set the controls to get it to wake me up. I use my iPhone.

Notice how the title of this post isn’t “All Appliances Should Be Made By Apple” or even “All Computers Should Be Made By Apple” (or the byline would be something along the lines of “MG Siegler”). There are moments in life where you need a PC, but there aren’t many where you need your coffee maker to also warm water for tea, your pepper holder to double as a flashlight, or one remote to turn on your TV and another to change the channel.

 

 

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In what looks like a sudden rush of post-Lion spring cleaning, Apple has outed a veritable cornucopia of minor updates to many of its core applications.

iTunes, iWeb, iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, and GarageBand all get tweaks of varying orders of magnitude as well as the Remote Desktop Client and HP's printer drivers.

Here are the details in no particular order - other than the one they appear in in the Software Update window above.

iWeb is bumped to version 3.0.4 updating overall stabilty and 'a number of minor issues'.

iTunes has now reached version 10.4 and has been tweaked to work with OSX Lion's fancy new full screen mode. It is also now a full 64-bit Cocoa application and comes with the usual security and stability improvements.

Apple is warning that, because the underlying code has been rewritten, some third party plug-ins may be broken, so check with the developer before making the plunge if they are something you can't live without.

iMovie 9.0.4 gets support for opening projects imported from the iOS version of the video editing package, fixes a problem where some audio adjustments were lost on saving a project and speeds up performance when working with large quantities of video clips with keywords, or large iPhoto libraries.

iPhoto 9.1.5 gets the standard compatibility, performance and stability updates alongside a number of minor bug fixes.

These include a tweak to the way dates and times are displayed, better scrolling when event titles are displayed, improved Ken Burns effect in some slide-shows, better implementation of deletion of web album files using the contextual menu and an issue where pics which had been cropped stayed cropped when using the 'revert to original' command. 

GarageBand 6.0.4 gets the usual stuff plus a fix for the way GarageBand lessons are stored, better syncing for tempo-based effects and a problem with the way Magic GarageBand files open in the track view has been resolved.

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Apple has released a second minor update to its iOS mobile operating system just ten days after the last security fix.

Although Apple plays its security cards close to its chest, the very fact that it has released an unannounced upgrade suggest that the security issue was critical.

The iPhone maker's security advisory says that unpatched devices could be vulnerable to an  attacker with a privileged network position who may capture or modify data in sessions protected by SSL/TLS as well as other attacks involving X.509 certificate validation.

The update adds improved validation of X.509 certificate chains and is recommended for every iOS device including those as far back as the original iPhone still running iOS3.1.

One hit updates for your specific device are available through iTunes although those of you operating outside of Apple's walled garden might be happier here.

Apple’s none too fond of nasty security flaws lurking about in iOS, and they’re not above cracking out rapid-fire updates to prove it. Just 10 days after the release of iOS 4.3.4 (which existed almost solely to kill off a potentially nasty PDF exploit), they’re back with another one: iOS 4.3.5.

The main fix in this minor patch? A fix for a security flaw which might allow “attacker with a privileged network position may capture or modify data in sessions protected by SSL/TLS”. In other words, hackers on the same network could store or change traffic that would otherwise be rather intensely encrypted.

Unlike that last patch (which, due to the exploit patched, did away with the one-click-jailbreak site JailbreakMe), this one seems to have no affect on jailbreakers. According to Redmond Pie, the only jailbreak method that still worked with 4.3.4 (tethered redsn0w) still seems to get the job done here.

This one’s pretty hefty for a security patch, coming in at a whopping 666 megabytes. Once iOS 5 and its fancy over-the-air/delta updates (wherein only the stuff that has changed needs to be downloaded), these one-off security updates should be a whole lot less time consuming.

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We’ve been saying for a while now that Samsung is primed and ready to dethrone Nokia from its nearly 15 year reign as the top smartphone maker in the world, and it would seem the moment is upon us. We can’t say for sure, as Samsung hasn’t released official numbers, but research firm Strategy Analytics told Bloomberg that Samsung’s official sales numbers should fall between 18 million and 21 million units sold worldwide.

Should Samsung pull in upwards of 20.3 million units sold, the South Korea-based company will also trump Apple’s quarterly iPhone sales. Samsung is expected to take a 20 percent market share, while Nokia’s feature phone division has kept the Finnish phone maker out front with a 26 percent share.

“Samsung’s Android portfolio is selling strongly in most regions,” said Strategy Analytics analyst Neil Mawston. “Samsung stands a reasonable chance of capturing the top spot on a quarterly basis if it can continue expanding its Android portfolio across high-growth markets like China and Brazil. Samsung and Apple will be at similar levels in smartphones by the end of the year.”

Samsung also makes and sells “dumb phones” that run Bada OS, which of course contributes to these impressive quarterly estimates. However, talk of Samsung’s recent success can’t go much further without mention of the Galaxy S II, which sold over 3 million units in its first 55 days. That’s one Galaxy S II sold every 1.5 seconds. According to analysts, the S II actually doubled Samsung’s mobile operating profit in the second quarter, and still has yet to launch in the U.S.

Samsung’s flagship (the SGSII) is expected to launch on American soil in August, while Apple is expected to debut the next iPhone in September. Both phones should heat up the race nicely, as the Android vs. iOS battle rages on.